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Why You Might Not Know What’s Going On at the G-20 Summit in Hangzhou

A reporter, left, watches Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech at a business-advisory meeting on a mobile phone while waiting in a security line to enter the venue in Hangzhou on Saturday.
Photo:
James T. Areddy/The Wall Street Journal

China’s meticulous organization of this year’s Group of 20 summit extends to arrangements for the thousands of reporters covering the event, where coddling includes a well-equipped media center with strong wireless Internet, a gift bag, lavish buffets and even separate prayer nooks for men and women.

One early frustration at G-20 risks denting the outreach: Security is so tight that press officers of some national delegations say they are having a hard time figuring out how to brief reporters about the proceedings.

Meetings shouldn’t be hard to arrange. The 10,000 square meter media center is just down a marble staircase from the primary meeting halls on the third floor of the new Hangzhou International Expo Center. But, as with so much in Hangzhou this week, a security cordon puts the staircase off limits to everyone.

“We actually tried to have briefings at [the media center], but because we don’t have the pass to go into the venue, we could only cancel those sessions:(,” the press officer of one Asian nation said by email, ending his note with a sad-face emoticon.

The delegation’s hotel isn’t an alternative, the spokesman said, because advance permission is required to admit anyone through the front doors who isn’t officially registered to stay there, like reporters.

Seemingly every detail was considered for the G-20, including providing up to 5,000 reporters with all they need to do their jobs—and then some. Initially, many journalists were happy to enjoy coffee, snacks and big meals in the event’s airy media center equipped with fast, free and uncensored Internet.

Exaggerating Hangzhou’s security measures is challenging.

Chinese security personnel open a gate that leads to the G-20 media center in Hangzhou.
Photo:
Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

For press, only participants with the right credentials are permitted into official hotels, which also serve as the places to board special G-20 vans. Those are the only available vehicles able to pass road checkpoints to access a zone encircled by barbed wire fencing that severs the neighborhood of the Expo Center from the rest of Hangzhou.

At various points, an army of police, security staff and volunteers double- and triple-checks identification badges using electronic monitors and lists on clipboards.

The X-ray process, another measure, begins at the exits of Hangzhou’s airport and railway stations and is repeated at hotels and elsewhere with big machines painted with China’s logo for this year’s G-20 summit. At those checkpoints, participants are also body-searched and required to hand over bottled water, food and sharp objects.

Delegates go through similar checks but in different places.

A spokesman for the organizers couldn’t be reached for comment. Speaking late last month at a regular briefing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said: “All governments around the world take temporary measures to ensure security for such high-level meetings.”

One European government’s team trying to prepare for press conferences did a dry run on Friday, ahead of Sunday’s summit, and determined the only way their officials could get face-to-face with the media is to take shuttle buses, a spokeswoman said. The route requires two different buses—those for officials—to get away from the Expo Center, then two more, which the media can use, to get back inside, she said. That, she estimates, turns a five-minute walk downstairs into a troublesome journey of at least a half hour.

Exasperated with her ordeal trying to gain access, the European official joked that finding a workable solution might require a personal request to Chinese President Xi Jinping from his U.S. counterpart, Barack Obama.

Security was also flustering efforts by reporters to connect to the primary sideline event to the summit, a business-advisory meeting that began Saturday called the B-20.

Held inside a golden sphere-shaped building in another part of Hangzhou, additional security arrangements there meant that reporters were standing in another X-ray line while the keynote speaker, the Chinese president, was addressing the crowd. Just a few walls away from Mr. Xi, some reporters used their mobile phones to watch the speech as it was broadcast live.

It seems that security too tight makes people unhappy as well. Guess how quickly people forget those terrorist attacks all over the world. Even China got its own Islamic terrorists targeting this G20 but China is determined to prevent any terrorist attempts at this G20 meeting.

Actually, with the global economic climate so bad except the US but with so many other distractions like the Middle East and the South China Sea, one wonders if the 2 truly global trends will get any airing let alone figuring out possible solutions:

(1) Head wind is blowing against both the trans-Pacific TPP and the trans-Atlantic global trade deals with rising national protectionism.

(2) The world's major central bankers, except the US' Fed, are mostly on loose monetary policies, really low interest rates or even negative interest rates giving concerns what tools will they be using in the next financial crisis.

One wonders if anything substantive besides platitude will be discussed and published.

You suggest maybe asking Obama to ask Xi for permission to use the stairway. Or use the official G-20 biffy, or whatever.

But Obama's answer is that he does not have time for golf, and he has no influence with Xi, even for Americans thrown in jail, like the wife of the Houstn CHamber of Commerce official who was just sentenced to three years in jail.

Watch what you say. Criticize Xi just a little and you may be "disappeared".